A movie about the brain-dead for the brain-dead: a review of White Zombie (1932).
Finally watched the 1932 White Zombie last night/early this morning.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know: first horror movie about zombies; seminal horror movie that helped lengthen and deepen the horror movie craze in the U.S. in the 1930's ('cause boy howdy, nothin' helps a body get through a depression and a Dee-pression quite like a movie fulla people gettin' dismembered and discombobulated, with some eggheaded nutjob cacklin' wildly at the proceedin's....); arguably Bela Lugosi's greatest performance, for which he was paid a measly-even-for-the-time U.S. $800 (and speaking of his "performance": I'll hereby vow not to sneer with disdain at the on-screen posturings, preenings and muggings of Shahrukh Khan any more, OK..?); an allegory not only of white slavery (the luring or kidnapping of naïve young white girls into sexual slavery that was supposedly an epidemic in the U.S. from around the 1870s through the 1920s, fears of which were the basis of the Mann Act of 1910, a nifty catch-all legal tool by which such undesirables as Jack Johnson, Charlie Chaplin and Chuck Berry were told that they'd better shape up or ship out), but also of wage slavery and the need for strong unions so's working stiffs (literally, here....) can catch a break; first major U.S. horror film not influenced by the German Expressionists, and yet often blessed with interestingly stylized and moody set design for all of that; the last gasp of a few once major silent movie stars (Madge Bellamy as the female lead Madeline, Robert Frazer as the lecherous Charles Beaumont), old vaudevillians (Joseph Cawthorn as the incessantly pipe-smoking missionary Dr. Brunner), siblings of major silent movie stars (John Harron, brother of Robert ["Bobby"] Harron, as Neil Parker, Madeline's groom), and silent movie directors (Victor Halperin, who previously was billed by his full name, Victor Hugo Halperin) who never entirely approved of -- or, on the basis of White Zombie, ever quite came to grips with -- the talkies; Lugosi's alchemist-cum-hungan Murder (whose last name, Legendre, is never used in the movie) apparently working both sides of the street, as he tells Robert Frazer's Charles Beaumont after he's dosed him with his zombifying drug, "I've taken a fancy to you, m'sieur!"; Brandon Hurst, who made such an impression as Barkilphredo in the 1928 The Man Who Laughs, making an appearance here as Beaumont's butler Silver -- and then spoiling his own death scene by holding his nose as Murder's zombies dump him into the drink; but goddamn is it ever one tedious, excruciating, stagey, ill-written, badly acted, hellaciously BO-ring movie.
You know how some movies are so bad that they're hilarious, while others are so leaden and dull they're not? White Zombie is one of the latter.
Seriously: I recognize that White Zombie is a terribly important "legacy" movie that should be seen at least once by anyone with a serious interest in film history or in horror movies in particular; but it creaks far more loudly than Murder's sugar mill (the only good scene in this clunker, IMO, and even so, the lousy tumble that the zombie takes into the grindstones nearly turns it into camp), and for all that the DVD's verbally unnamed commentator (the downside of renting DVDs through Netflix: you don't get to read the notes on the clamshell or whatever liner notes are tucked inside when the talker doesn't think to introduce himself) underlines the technically-impressive-for-1932 sound effects and plundered musical score (a tradition that George Romero would proudly continue in his vastly superior Night of the Living Dead) -- along with supposedly original numbers by Xavier Cugat -- many of them -- that terribly unconvincing geek's squawk of that terribly unconvincing vulture; the largely wildly inappropriate music -- undercut whatever spooky mood the sets and occasionally clever cinematography have managed to invoke. White Zombie should've been made as a silent (or at least as a semi-silent, like Carl Dreyer's Vampyr of the same year: another grindingly slow and badly dated horror classic that nonetheless is many times more gripping than White Zombie; Vampyr's death-in-a-mill scene trumps White Zombie's too): every time someone opens his big fat yapper, the ineptly-wrought evocation of terror and suspense vanishes like a mist in the sun. And for all the big love given to Jack Pierce's make-up effects and the Mephistophelean look of Lugosi's Murder, his eyebrows are even more unconvincing in his frequent close-ups than Donald Trump's hair; it looks like someone glued two malformed wooly bear caterpillars above Lugosi's peepers -- yet another mood-killer in a movie chockablock with them.
In short, White Zombie is one of those movies that is much more fun to talk or write about than to actually watch (much like at least 75% of Roger Corman's output). Document of racial and national attitudes, evidence of white America's sexual panic and anxieties about The Labor Problem and simultaneous prurient desire for titillation and cheap thrills (Madge Bellamy is actually briefly displayed in her strapless bra and tummy-control panties), White Zombie is both far more and far less than it appears at first viewing. I doubt very much if I'll ever watch this thing again (or, if I do, at least I can watch it for free thanks to sites such as EZ Takes); give me Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932, starring Boris Karloff) or Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls (1933, starring Charles Laughton) or, hell, even Tod Browning's Freaks (1932; let's face it: this is another horror classic that should've been filmed as a silent) instead.
Oh, you want to know White Zombie's plot? Well. Upper crust twits Neil and Madeline go to Haiti for their honeymoon (!), meet a lecherous West Indies aristocrat on their ship named Charles who manages to talk them into postponing their actual wedding until they reach his plantation in the hopes that he can slip Madeline seven inches of throbbing pink Jesus and ditch Neil; when Madeline primly refuses to come across, Charles in desperation meets with an even shadier fellow plantation- (and castle-; don't ask...) owner with the off-putting name of Murder to help him spirit away Madeline, promising him anything he wants in return, little realizing that Murder wants his own proud, aristocratic flesh, as well as that of Madeline. Neil becomes a lush after Madeline seemingly expires at their wedding dinner, but snaps out of it when he discovers Madeline's tomb to be empty. Neil turns to the doddering, pipe-smoking missionary Dr. Bruner -- who had performed Neil and Madeline's marriage ceremony -- for advice and help; Bruner gives him the zombie spiel again, quoting the Haitian penal code (which has a law against making people even appear to be dead, even if they later turn out to be A-OK) at him, until Neil desultorily agrees to accompany him on a quest to Murder's castle. Good triumphs over evil, with Murder meeting a very limp-dicked and anti-climactic end. Bruner is still looking for a match for his damn pipe. The end.